The Wolf Of All Streets - Does Crypto Have A Future? Futurist Breaks It Down | Dan Jeffries

Episode Date: March 24, 2022

How does crypto shape our future? It might influence everything from government to banking. On this episode of The Wolf Of All Streets, Dan Jeffries (@Dan_Jeffries1) — author, futurist, systems architect and thinker — explores the power of crypto, and its potential dark side. Dan and host Scott discuss the importance of cryptocurrencies, how crypto technology has challenged the nature of money, and why blockchain technologies are here to stay. ••• FIND US ON SOCIAL ••• Scott Melker: https://twitter.com/scottmelker Dan Jeffries: https://twitter.com/Dan_Jeffries1 Production & Marketing Team: https://penname.co/ ••• JOIN THE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER ••• 📩 https://www.getrevue.co/profile/TheWolfDen ••• THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSOR ••• Secure your assets, secure your future, with Arculus. Arculus is the crypto cold storage wallet that combines the world’s strongest security protocols with an easy-to-manage app. Store, swap, and send your crypto all with a simple tap of your Arculus Key™ card. Order the safer, simpler, smarter crypto cold storage solution today at https://amazon.com/arculus

This podcast is sponsored by Arculist. Stay tuned for more information on them later in the episode. What's up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, and this is the Wolf of All Streets podcast, where two times every week I talk to your favorite personalities from the worlds of Bitcoin, finance, music, trading, arts, sports, politics, basically anyone with a good story to tell. I think a lot of people who are interested in cryptocurrencies don't understand the power that it could have on our future. I think people have a problem with exponential thinking and understanding how crypto alongside AI and technology are likely going to drive the narrative and what the entire world looks like moving forward. Well, today I have a guest who

is that kind of thinker and can probably tell us what we can look forward to in the future. Dan Jeffries is an author, futurist, systems architect, public speaker, and pro-blogger. He's the number one writer on Hacker Noon. So I'm very, very interested in hearing his vision for the future. Dan, thank you so much for joining. Thanks for having me on, Scott. I appreciate it.

So, Dan, are we living in a simulation? Of course. There was just a story in wire that was called, of course, we're living in a simulation. I mean, look at quantum physics, right? It's like the idea that you don't know like which of the, you know, the prover, the proved are exactly the same thing, right? We can't tell the difference between everything that looks like hard space is really just a bunch of, you know, empty space in between things, right? It all is like an illusion.

You go back to the Buddhists, they thought the same things about 2,000 years before quantum physics came around. So it seems pretty likely that we're living in a simulation today. And who are our AI overlords? Whose simulation is this? I suppose that presumes that you need to have like a creator right that you need to have a beginning right that goes back to the old questions of god doesn't it right it's like do we need something to kick it all off or does it just start from nothingness right and there that actually is i mean you go back to the beginning of the big bang and it's largely it's

largely nuts right either there was nothing and then there was something, or there was like a bunch of foam that was churning around for eternity and then somehow decided to not be foam and to turn into everything, or there was an all-powerful creator that was like, boom, I have now gone across the face of the, you know, the void and I have thus created things, right? Or it was just always there and none of those explanations actually make any sense whatsoever. And we can't comprehend them at all. So we may have none, or we may have some from a former generation that we just can't see. Right. It's effectively an infinite regress, right? Every story begins somewhere that needs

a beginning and we can't explain. So there's always a, how did that first thing happen? That's right. It's turtles all the way down, right. So you could, there's always a, how did that first thing happen? That's right. It's turtles all the way down, right? So that it works. Really fascinating. Okay. So let's assume that this is real life and we have to actually deal with it and contemplate it, right?

Yeah. Why is cryptocurrency important? Why is it such a earth shattering invention? And what does that mean for us? I'll say, you know, we are probably, there are some truth in, in, uh, in reality. So I always say like, if you, if you think everything is relative, then go jump out a hundred story window and you'll learn that gravity is very real and it has a hundred to zero record. Right. So, um, there are some things that are pretty real, whether we want to believe it or not um but gravity is undefeated you know like it's like the old monk right who said you know the young monk comes to him and

says okay you know i'm really really sad i learned in my class you know that you can take any side of an argument it absolutely doesn't matter you can make an equal case for the side and so the old monk says oh well you know that's that's really good. You know, so for instance, could you tell me that your nose doesn't exist? He goes, well, of course, you know, and so then the monk punches him in the nose and says, what hurts, right? So the answer is your nose is very real, right? And you get hit and it hurts. But look, cryptocurrency, let's jump into it. I mean, I think I've always said, you know, crypto can be a parallel economic operating system for the world. Right. And it can be an analog to cash because cash is absolutely getting deleted from society. It's they're absolutely going to destroy cash. They've already gone in a number of different directions to try to do that.

I mean, you had India outlaw certain bills and then have to backtrack, but that's only because they kind of started too early, right? In the not too distant future, we have central bank digital currencies, which are absolutely happening. And a lot of folks in the crypto space say, oh, that's not happening. Or why would anyone use that? It's just totally delusional. They're absolutely happening, right? And they're going to delete cash, right? So I think you have to have some alternative that allows you to disagree. And it allows you to do things kind of outside of things, because sometimes, you know, within a society, things are, you know, not allowed at one point in time, and then they're allowed later, right? You look at something like, I don't even something like marijuana legislation, or whatever, and those things that have changed over time, or like, even you look at something like

when you're in a war situation, right? You take something like the black market, right? And the black market in a first world country is only like evil things and, you know, buying, you know, things that, you know, kill people or whatever, right? But in the black market, it might, you know, in a third world country or in a war situation, like we're seeing now, it might be diapers and it might be medicines to save your kid. Right. So you you don't want that. You don't want a central power being able to say, great, you know, we've decided this ethnicity or this subgroup or this, you know, hated group of the month. We're going to turn off all of the money and they're not going to be able to do any shopping or buy clothes or whatever. We're going to starve them out. We don't have to fire a single shot. So there's some there's some kind of horrible things that I think central bank digital currencies

can bring along. That said, I don't want to go too dystopian on it. I also think there's a lot of value in central bank digital currencies. And I think a lot of people in the crypto community think it's a totally useless thing, but I think it's going to be quite amazing when we have sort of digital currencies across the board. I agree. I think everybody agrees that technology is unstoppable, right? Undefeated like gravity. And that it's inevitable that we will advance money just like we've advanced everything else using technology. I think the concerns obviously then come with privacy and control and the ease with which central banks will be able to enact monetary policy. They want to print some money, send you a transaction. They want your taxes,

take that transaction out. They want to know who you paid yesterday for dinner. They can see that, right? So I think that that's where the problem comes. And like you said, of course, that's where maybe Bitcoin and private cryptocurrencies, if you want to call them that, are decentralized, step in. Yeah. And like I say, parallel economic operating system, right? They can act as a sort of bulk work against those types of thing and allow people to dissent or allow people to do alternative things. And sometimes kind of ahead of the curve, right? If you look at some of the things like people wanted to do cryptocurrencies across instant messengers or things like that, as soon as you had kind of Telegram decide to do something like that immediately, like they came under attack from

kind of centralized powers because, you know, you don't want this, they don't want that thing kind of flying along invisibly. And look, in many ways, there's good reason for that too. Like I try not to take this kind of absolutist view of things, right? Whenever I think about the future, I think about how things develop. I try not to be siloed in my own viewpoint, right? Unfortunately, I think almost everybody has their kind of personality programming, how they view the world, and they think of it as absolute reality, right? In other words, like, if there's a sphere that's the sum totality of knowledge, we're just a little point on the sphere, but we mistake that for the whole sphere. And what I try to do is kind of step out and see these other points, right? So

I try not to see it just from like a libertarian or a conservative or a far right or far left. I try to look at how these things develop over time. And I think that there are good reasons to want to control the monetary supply. I mean, we look at the sanctions right now on Russia, and it's like basically fighting an economic war against something that, you know, the vast majority of the world is sort of lined up against. And that saves us potentially, so far, at least, maybe by the time this airs, that's not true from a shooting war, right? Which, you know, is going to be deliver a tremendous amount of destruction, right? And so being able to enact these kinds of like controls are sometimes useful. And you don't want people, you know, using it for human trafficking

and things like that. So there's this balance that I hope develops in the technology. In other words, as we just look at the technology now, it's just like, okay, we've created digital money with no central printer. That's great. But I'd love to see sort of decentralized consensus mechanisms that allow like, okay, a two-third majority vote allows me to unlock a universal key and decrypt this message, right? Or, you know, there are 20 stakeholders around the world that have like a, you know, a super node and get to, you know, agree to a super majority, get this change in policy. These kinds of things I think would be actually fantastic, right? And I think we're just kind of way behind on doing these things. We haven't been able to kind of get there yet.

That sounds like Dow-driven government. Yeah, I mean, Dow-driven government, although like, you know, I've done a lot of thinking on Dows in and of themselves. And I think there's probably an interim step. There's probably a hybrid of kind of a government or a corporation in the Dow. I think mostly a Dow has been thought of as like a way to distribute, you know, a super smart contract to distribute money. But like, you know, if you look at a lot of the Dow systems, they're, they're kind of ridiculous, right? The idea that we're going to, we're going to vote on like, who's ordering pencils or whatever in the, in the company, like, you know, look, corporations are imperfect, but they've been the engines of commerce for hundreds of years.

They're an amazing creation, actually, like distributed shareholder wealth and distributed risk, actually. Going back to like the Dutch East Indies Company, British, but there's a check and balance voting mechanism or like a public voting system, almost like a combination of like a Greek Senate system and like a representative democracy would be an incredible kind of system, right? So I think that's where we have to get to. I think it's gonna take some time.

We're probably looking at decades, if not 50 or 100 years for those things to become mainstream. It's like this. Interesting, right? As you said, most Dows not 50 or 100 years for those things to become mainstream. Interesting. Right. As you said, most DAOs, I think, are sort of ridiculous. People forget that they're still humans, right? Humans aren't created collectively making decisions.

And then you talk about then DAOs are going to require elected leaders. And then we basically just have government within the DAO. And we probably end up in the exact same place 100 years from now, just digitally. And so it really does beg the question of where that's all going. But I think it also brings up an important point, which is that we sort of have this bipolarity about centralization and decentralization, especially in the crypto community. They want this full decentralized against centralized authorities. As you said, with corporations, there are certain times when centralization is really important to get things done. It works, right? So I think we need to realize that there's this entire sliding scale between centralization and decentralization and just moving generally in the direction of decentralization maybe is enough without everything being fully decentralized? Yeah, look, in every type of system, I always look at things as an abstract pattern, right? And when you think about each system has strengths and weaknesses, centralization has great strengths and it has great weaknesses and decentralization has the same strengths and weaknesses. So if you

think about, for instance, the, you know, the South and the Civil War was a very decentralized army, right? Versus the North, which was a very centralized army and at one point in time when the north finally you know you know got the you know got their shit together and like charged down you know through a bunch of different states you know you've got kind of virginia calling out to another state going hey we need some help over here and they're like deal with your own shit we got our own problems right and so you know and there's nobody nobody like no you're, and there's nobody, nobody like, no, you're, you know, there's no Admiral Nimitz in World War II, you know, to say, look, you're going there, whether you like it, MacArthur and like Haisley, and, you know, you're both going to this and you're doing this mission. And if you're not in the right place at the right time, you better go get there.

And so I think that there's, again, there's, there's all kinds of advantages and advantages to different, to different things. And, you know things. And to fall on one side of the other is kind of foolish. It's really the design pattern or design decision based on the problem that you're trying to solve, right? And I do think it's a pendulum too, right? I think we've seen so much centralization and we've seen such the rise of kind of the nation state in the modern world right i mean and and there's been sort of so much centralization of power that it is natural for for when something gets too extreme to kind of swing to another direction and just to want to see kind of this decentralization movement and there's going to be some value in in having that around in society as well both from a communication standpoint and from a you know a currency standpoint and from an

information distribute you know distribution standpoint There's a number of different ways that it's useful. But again, we'll probably have to solve some additional problems. I mean, think about the early days of like LimeWire where half the time you're getting a virus, right? Because there's nobody to say like, we're not going to allow viruses on the network, right? So people complain about Apple and in some respects, rightly so, right? To say like oh you know you're charging too much or you don't let certain types of policies happen but they also do we really want to right do we really want to open the door anyone can just go wherever they want and say your program can do whatever it wants to do and now like you know a link redirects you to you know malware in the middle of the application like people aren't going to like that either so there's always this

trade-off that i think people oftentimes don't pay close enough attention to. Yeah, that's a really important point. So you wrote an article that I loved on Coindesk last year entitled, it's 2031, this is the world that crypto created. First of all, I want you to go into what the world that crypto created looked like in 2031. I also find it fascinating. I looked and you wrote this on May 21st, 2021, which was right after a major crash, right? This is really when Bitcoin topped generationally, at least it felt like going into last summer when Bitcoin was 65,000 in 10 days, I mean, effectively corrected, you know, 50%. So what does it look like in 2031? And how did you print that with conviction right after a crash? I mean, look, I don't, I look at things over a much longer time horizon, I mean, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 100 years, right? So

individual movements, I've always said that, you know, Bitcoin and, you know, current versions of crypto are kind of like a banana republic, right? And there's always, there's always volatility in a banana republic, people like, Oh, my God, it's worth a trillion dollars. I'm like, yeah, that's worth less than Apple by like a factor of two. We're not even bigger than the biggest corporation. We're still kind of a banana republic, which means that there's a lot of volatility there. And that's fine. That's early growing pains. When you look at the early car industry, there were two, 300 car companies in the United States alone, all doing very specialized things until they you know,

they started to figure out how to make windshield wipers in the most effective way. And they started to unite the supply chains and then it starts to consolidate. This pattern happens again and again throughout history, through all technology, that diffusion of innovation curve, right? So from my standpoint, you know, crypto technology, which is, I tend to think of it as sort of, you know, digital currencies, both central bank digital currencies and kind of decentralized currencies. I tend to think of it as decentralization technology. I tend to think of it as communications, right? What I start to look at is like, how does this develop in the sort of modern world? Like, how does this develop into the future, right? So

like, if you look at something like shareholding right right now we have shareholding and basically the biggest corporations in the world but theoretically tomorrow if we have a ton of kind of you know distributed ledgers essentially they're just distributed databases we could have shareholding in anything i could have shareholding in the coffee shop i just went into right and uh and i might decide that i want to own a tiny little bit of that and get some kind of you know dividend over the course of time if you think about property ownership uh both from a standpoint of owning like uh right now the only kind of deeds for any sort of property ownership are generally for gigantic you know purchases like a house or even a car and it's generally at this at the state level but imagine you've got sort of decentralized property across the board now

my bike or whatever has a deed to it now Now, at some level, that's kind of control, right? Because they can kind of know who owns everything. But at the same time, when my bike gets stolen, you know, the cops are going to know whose, you know, whose bike it is. And like, when they pick it up off, you know, getting dumped somewhere on the street, right, then suddenly, it can come back to me, right? And I can see sort of a distributed legend for a million things, right? Even from a kind of generational understanding of like who owns what. So you look at something like the revolution in China, right? Where like the communists came in and essentially just said,

well, now the government owns all this property, we're destroying every deed. And you had these deeds that were kind of went back hundreds of years or whatever, right? I look at that even as a sort of transient thing, right? Whether that's two or 300 years. So if you had a property ledger that sort of survived that kind of thing, then there's a point in time when if that, you know, you know, that regime is gone, right? That someone might be able to lay in, you know, an ancient claim to something that they had in the past as well, right? So these are the kinds of things that I think are, you know, that are fascinating. And there's a million other things that I think are coming, you know, down the pike. I think, you know, future kids are really going to trust algorithms probably more than they do their bankers. I think they're probably

going to go to, you know, a distributed liquidity pool to, to, to, to lend anything. If we look at the lending pools now, they're kind of terrible, right? It's like, well, you know, you put in 150% and get out, you know, 10% extra crypto for a period of time. Eventually, like, you'll be able to take your student loans out on that and, like, you know, anything else that you would want to do. And it'll just be a decentralized collateral mechanism. And that is going to open up all kinds of new things in the same way that when we came up with the concept of distributed risk, that allowed explorers to then go across the world with highly risky endeavors of picking up spices from far, far away, and your ship might crash. But if you distribute the risk to a lot of different people, it allows that to start happening at a bigger scale. And the same thing starts to happen when you can decentralize liquidity and investment.

Maybe now microloans across the board become essentially something that's super possible. And it's not just for a third world country, but for even first world countries. And you look at the differences that's made there. A woman's able to get enough money to start a chicken farm and levels up the entire economic prosperity of her village. All of a sudden sudden these things make a massive difference. And I think right now you'd never get a loan for that other than from charity. Right. And you certainly wouldn't get it from, from a bank, but if we had these sort of masses, you know, pools, I think you'd have a very different scenario. So I think there's just, I think there's amazing things coming down. And whenever I gaze into the future, I always see, I always see so many things that are exciting. And then I try to look at both the light and the dark side of it and kind

of everything in between. Yeah. I mean, do the competitive legacy systems die for all that to happen? I mean, do we get to a point where it's so easy to get a loan, obviously, from some sort of decentralized liquidity pool, then why would a bank even really need to exist in the first place? Maybe. I mean, I think banks, you know, will evolve. And I think banks will probably be involved in it in some way. They might be like the, they might be the certificate of trust on certain types of like, you know, for certain types of thing, or they might be the KYC thing, or they might be the identifier, like, you know, so if you have a decentralized identity chain, which I thought about a lot about,

you might have a decentralized identity chain that's very layered, right? So I might have one that just says I exist as Daniel Jeffries, and nobody can take that from me. But then if I go work at a company, they add on the layer that says I work at that company or the government adds on a layer that says I'm a part of this nation state or the et cetera. Right. And so that might be revocable, but that would give me certain rights and privileges within sort of the, you know, the digital ecosystem or the real world as well, right? So I think they might be the guarantees of certain types of identity or just like, hey, this is a trusted channel and we're going to do some filtering on the scams that happen within here or we're going to punish bad actors in some way with this particular protocol. So I think those things are probably not going to go away. Sometimes when you look at technology, the older version disappears. There's not a lot of horses running around on the streets anymore, except

maybe in New York Central Park as a romantic getaway or something. So eventually there's a technology that will displace an old technology, but most of the time you see things sort of evolve, right? If we look at kind of codec dying in terms of analog film after a hundred plus years, yeah, well, film and cameras didn't die, right? It just evolved into the thing where we got so small, we could put it on a chip and we put it into this amazing new device that now, you know, that everybody has in their pocket.

They can now take a billion pictures, store them and upload them instantly, you know, across the world and share them with friends, right? And so the technology evolved into something else. And there are still, you know, digital film companies, they're just making the chips behind it, or they're making the software behind it now, maybe they're not as big as, you know, as Kodak, but they're, but they certainly have like power within that, and they evolved into something else. Yeah, It sounds like you described banks, almost like oracles and crypto now, right. Verifying the data,

which actually makes a ton of sense. And you talk about obviously the horse and carriage effectively being replaced by the car, but to your point, we're still driving cars, right. A hundred years later, we're not living in the Jetsons. We're not flying around. It's just the evolution of the car, but we're still driving cars. Yeah, we're still driving cars. And then maybe in like, you know, 10 or 20 years, we're not driving them anymore. We're just, you know, we're sitting there on a call or reading a book or, you know, talking to our friends and, you know, because the AIs are

driving them, but it's still a car taking us around, right? The car just evolves. And I think it's the same way with most technologies. It's very rare that you get a technology that kind of completely replaces an old technology. Obviously, the gun comes along and replaces the sword. And so there are these kind of, these sort of unique leaps forward in terms of the things that are possible,

but they're much more rare than I think people generally understand. I agree. So we live in this future. I always joke, my daughter's seven, my son is two. I always joke with them that they'll never drive a car, sort of to your point, right? They'll just probably never have to learn to drive a car. The car will drive them. It'll do a better job than a teenager staring at their phone. But this frees up endless time for people, right? You're sitting in your car and you no longer have to drive. Technology is doing our jobs.

We have so much more time because of technology. What are individuals going to do with all of this free time in the future that technology is opening up? We all believe and know that cryptocurrencies are the future, but it's still very scary to be your own bank and have to secure your assets. Most of the traditional hardware wallets are hard to use. They're clunky and people lose their private keys. It's not really that efficient. And that's where the Arculus key card comes in. I absolutely love this thing. I've transitioned largely to using it for most of my assets. It's literally just a card that you tap right on your mobile device.

You can send, receive, swap, buy, and sell crypto with that simple action. It's literally amazing. There's no cords. There's no charging. There's no Bluetooth. The only person that has access to your crypto is you. You guys have got to try it. And guess what? You can buy it right

on Amazon. Go buy your Arculus on Amazon now. I mean, the question is whether it ever frees it up or do we find something to like fill that void, right? I mean, water tends to like go fill an area that's kind of opened up, right? So if you look at all the advertisements from the 1950s of the labor-saving devices of the washing machine and the dishwasher and all these things, like, you know, suddenly what are people going to do with all that time? Well, they're going to work a ton more than they did. of like post-scarcity, you know, which I'm semi-skeptical of in the near future for people to really just be like, great, there's a whole legion of poets and philosophers who do whatever they want and are able to focus on that.

That said, I'm always for technology that allows more people to step out of their kind of day-to-day subsistence living. And that allows more people to express the full potential of their humanity. I can't imagine how many Einsteins that were budding never made it because they were driving a bus 12 hours a day to feed their family, right?

Or they were just born in the wrong nation at the wrong time, the wrong color, feed their family, right? Or they were just born in the wrong nation at the wrong time, the wrong color, whatever it is, right? At that point in time, whoever's in power that made it very difficult for them to kind of actualize their potential. So any technology that kind of helps us actualize our potential would be amazing.

And I hope that we evolve beyond the current state of community. I'm not sure what the kind of the X factor is to get us there. And the idea that we identify ourselves by our work, right, is a very new, you know, phenomena, right? It's like, it's something where like, in general, people work together in a tribal or village, and they had a job, but most of their job was gathering food right and like you know feeding their family and spending time right and you may be the blacksmith or whatever there's a couple other specializations most people didn't define themselves by that and then there was increased specialization which led to a bunch

of wonderful things but increasingly at this point i mean the first thing you say to party is you know what do you do after you ask what their name is, right? And so there is a possibility that we evolve to a point where we have a lot more free time. You know, maybe we get to some kind of like culture level, you know, thing where the machines are running the vast majority of it, right? And even banks kind of thing. And the vast majority of us can do whatever we want. I think we're a ways away from that kind of thing. Me too. think we're a ways away from that kind of thing. But like you said, the free time, the free time has to be socially acceptable, right? And so it's sort of what you said, if we still have the same mentality that you should be filling your time with work, and that's your identity, all you're going to do is work a hell of a lot more in that quote, unquote, free time, right? Assuming that you have a job in the AI and the robots, technology haven't taken it from you in the first place, right? I mean, don't, aren't we living in a world that's naturally in that manner, somewhat deflationary, right? I mean, technology

advances, things become cheaper. People don't have to work as much. Now that's not what's happening right now. Obviously prices are going up, but the natural state of things would be that, you know, you bought a TV 10 years ago and it was $3,000. The same TV is $300 now with more technology. And so things advance, they get cheaper. People should theoretically have to work less to pay for those things. And then you should have a renaissance of all these Einsteins appearing who otherwise would have been doing menial jobs. Yeah. And I think that would be wonderful. And the more we can actualize individual human potential, the better. And i i never worry about the i mean i have an artificial intelligence foundation the infrastructure alliance and so i spend a lot of time in that that world as well as you might

imagine and i i don't worry about you know i don't work i don't worry about stupid nonsense like super intelligence and this kind of crap that you know boston talks about i think it's just it's all based on insanity like you know yeah like skynet right terminator it's like it's you know it's like yeah like the there's like a thing in the bostrom book where it's like the paperclip theory where like you know an ai is designed to you know super intelligence designed to create a you know paperclip factory that's more efficient and eventually figures out how to turn the whole universe into paperclips and and people will like give this to me as if this is like a serious freaking argument. And I'm like, this is ridiculous. Like, first of all,

like if it's a super intelligence, like it's just going to designate the job to something, some other lesser, you know, AI intelligence. And second of all, if it thinks that, you know, changing the whole universe into paperclips, that's super psychotic. That's not super intelligent. So I'm actually hoping it's going to be a lot better than that. But look, I don't worry about them taking over. And I don't worry about them destroying all the jobs. I've always looked at the jobs as an

evolution. Like you didn't hunt the water buffalo in tan leather to make your own clothes today. And you're perfectly fine. Unfortunately, those jobs have disappeared, but you're just fine. And I think in the short term, like jobs disappearing create challenges, right? Especially when you have groups that have done the same thing their entire life, right? An individual pain, right? Where they can't be trained to do something else or they can't evolve

or they're not the type of person that's able to do those things. That's real pain. Society has to learn to deal with those types of things. It's very important. It should not be trivialized in any way. At the same time, jobs do continue to evolve. And when I look at artificial intelligence right now and narrow artificial intelligence, I tend to look at it as more of a centaur system. It's a hybrid.

In other words, we're working with the AI to do certain things, and it enhances our ability to do it. If I'm a material science designer or I'm looking to do drug discovery, I want the AI to go find 50,000 drug candidates that they didn't figure out. And then I want to iterate on the promising ones. If I think about music, I want in the future to be jamming on my guitar. And I want to go, look, continue this riff with 50 different versions. And I want to pick that one and go, that one's awesome. Iterate 20 more on that and then play that. So I see this sort of co-creative for the vast majority of the things that we're going to be doing with these things.

And I think it's just sort of like having an external alien intelligence that kind of helps us along the way. And it'll do some bad things too, of course, like everything is on the spectrum from good to evil, right? That's an interesting question. I mean, actually what you've described already exists.

I can't remember now the scientists and the study in the musician, but they've had music that's created by AI and then done basically tests with people said, is this Bach? Is this the AI? What is this? And people found the AI music to be superior even to Bach, right? Classical music across the board. So I mean, that what you're describing already exists. But it begs the question, is that future then sort of a post homo sapien reality where we force evolve ourselves to sort of, you know, couple with this AI to be a new species of human that is sort of somewhere in the middle of being, you know, robotic and technological and human. Do we become a more, do we become a mortal, you know, and like, I don't say immortal because a bus can still hit you and kill you, but you know, do we. Yeah. I mean, if you can snapshot your mind and back up your neurons or whatever, like are you effectively immortal? Yeah. Look,

I think thousands of years or whatever, we start to get to some level of, of post-immunity provided we don't blow ourselves up tomorrow, you know, with nukes or something like that, right? There's, you know, there's, there's a problem. There's, I mean, we're kind of sitting on the verge of World War III if we're not careful at this point, right? So there are, there are lots of ways to just sort of, and you see this in sci-fi as a theme, right? Where like, there are a bunch of, you know, God into the galaxy and there's a bunch of species that almost made it, but then destroyed themselves, right? So always possibility but i think that if we don't yeah we start to get

we start to become something different right whether that's through genetic engineering right even if there was a great book i think on this recently where like you know you may you may only have you know a thousand viable kind of like you know bursts in your lifetime but if the ai is able to kind of like or the genesis is able to give you like 10 000 different versions and kind of simulate out what those potential folks would look like and allow you to say like okay well this is the kid that i want like at some point in time doesn't that kind of become the way to do it and you'll have all kinds of resistance you'll have sort of religious groups and people are like this it's in the natural way and this is horrible. We should never do this.

Right. But at some point in time, like over hundreds or thousands of years, one kind of lives out over the other. Right. And so if you look historically, we're not the same creatures that we were then. I mean, like we're already kind of evolved to something completely different. I mean, what would you talk about with the Neanderthal? Right. I mean, what would you talk about with an old human? You know, everything that you would about with the Neanderthal, right? I mean, what would you talk about with an old human? You know, everything that you would think about would look like magic. Even the things that you care about on a day-to-day basis would seem completely ridiculous and alien, right?

I mean, people talk about now, like, wow, wouldn't they be, you know, ancient peoples be surprised about cars and planes? Yeah, they'd be surprised about that. But you know what they'd be surprised about? Go open your pantry and look at all the spices you have in there right i mean and they would be like why they would blow their mind right because the entire like almost the entire economy of the world was like packaged food right salted fish and beer and wine and pepper and cardamom and like three or four different spices right and there's there's great histories of the world

there's great history of the world with with those of things, like the Silk Roads is a great read, and also A History in Six Glasses, which talks about almost entire economies, tea, coffee, wine, beer, et cetera, right? These kinds of things. So look, we're always kind of evolving. Do we evolve to some sort of post-humanity? Yeah, I hope so. And I think that it's almost a natural evolution along a long enough timeline. Yeah. I mean, things shouldn't end here. So you talked about obviously being a fan of anything technological that allows people to have more time to think, be entrepreneurial, to opt out of the menial jobs that they're used to and generally forced to do. We're seeing, I think, the first iterations of that to some degree with Metaverse, NFT, certainly with play to earn gaming, you know, people in the Philippines, obviously opting

out of their jobs to play Axie Infinity, right? Do you see the NFTs and Metaverse playing a pivotal role in that moving forward? Is that where this is going to happen? I mean, look, when I see NFTs, I see the evolution of them as to having like actual legal smart contracts that like distribute rights and privileges along with those things as opposed to things that we have now. So I see them conferring actual ownership. I think that's maybe one of the first, you know, useful apps in terms of besides just sort of decentralized money. I think a lot of people laugh it off and it's understandable you're buying a JPEG or something like that.

But if you look at all the companies that are getting involved in it, right, you look at the Topps trading cards and all these kind of collectibles companies or whatever, they see the forest for the trees. And they've been involved in the like $300 billion collectibles market for a long time, right? The NBA and everything else. So I naturally see that, you know, kind of evolving. And yeah, people are going to make their money off digital collectibles. People are going to do all kinds of things. I think it actually started earlier than sort of the metaverse. So if you look back, you know, 10 years, most of the things that, you know, sort of govern my life, I mean, I'm a full-time digital nomad.

And so if I, I mean, I really a full-time digital nomad. And so if I, I mean, I really don't actually even have an apartment, right. I just live in Airbnbs and Airbnb didn't exist almost 10 years ago. And, you know, Spotify didn't exist 10 years ago. And, you know, the remote work was not really a thing, even though I've been doing it for 20 years, because, but I was still more localized, right. I was an IT administrator for a long time. So it was localized, even though I worked at home, because I had to go to my customer. But as the cloud came around, and then Zoom has come around in the last few years, you know, I can live anywhere in the world.

And I do, you know, I move around from place to place. So I think these things have, like, already started to happen. It's still for a very small number of folks, let's just be honest about it, right? And not everyone is going to certainly, you know, want that lifestyle. I mean, when I tell people about, you know, things I do, they're like, oh, that's great, except like, I got this job, I got these kids, or I've got this thing. And, you know, I wouldn't be able to just move them all the time, right? So I understand, right? And so, but I do think that what's interesting about that is not necessarily the way that I live. But the fact that there were these technologies, and it enabled me to

choose something that had never been chosen before, right? I couldn't do this 10 years ago. I couldn't have this interview with you and, you know, work with an AI company in California while being in Europe and start a foundation that's international and try to listen to music wherever I go and, you know, have my, you know, Netflix wherever I go and like, you know, get a house wherever I go and, you know, have my, you know, Netflix, wherever I go and like, you know, get a house wherever I want to go and then call a Lyft or an Uber wherever I am because I don't have a car. Right. But so I think we're going to see more of those kinds of things. The metaverse is an interesting one. I feel like that's been, I don't know. I love, I love the concept of the metaverse and I've loved it ever since sort of Neil, you know, Stevenson came up with it. He was one of

my favorite sci-fi authors. And I feel like it's become super buzzwordy in its current version like web 3 and metaverse is like around the corner i don't see it being just around the corner um i feel like there's a whole series of technologies like vr's got to develop a lot better vr is also kind of weird in reality right like the first time i ever got in vr i was like oh this is amazing i'm finally having it and then i was just dizzy and i'm like oh man i'm just old everyone was like do the international space station and three seconds into it i was like delete right you know like so like i've been like i'm probably not the audience but i think augmented reality becomes even more valuable though right i mean you know we looked at google glass and people thought oh this is horrible and

the privacy thing but look when i've got shades that will like give me a head-ups display of useful information as i'm walking down the beach or like hey i want to find a restaurant and i kind of blink at it and it shows me five restaurants in miami and it shows me a footpath and lighted you know steps along the way and how to walk. That's freaking awesome. Right. Or I just meet someone. I'm like, you know, I don't remember this person's name. And it's like, Oh, remember when you met this person five years ago? That's the name. And their daughter's got a birthday coming up and you're like, Hey, Scott, what's that? Oh my gosh. I couldn't use that. I went to dinner yesterday and ran into some guy that said

hi to me and I didn't recognize him. I would have killed for that feature at that moment. Right. You know, I want those things on my contact lenses or whatever right you know but so i think those technologies certainly help us get there the metaverse potentially in that um although i have i have difficulty seeing some of the potential of it whenever i have difficulty with the technology i try not to like discount it completely. I think that's always a mistake when you go, you know, when you just can't see all the potential. I think there's knee jerk reactions in crypto all the time. Well, I don't, I don't understand Bitcoin. So it's evil and wrong and stupid, right? You Warren Buffett it. Yeah, great. Yeah, you just Warren Buffett it, right? I don't understand smashy, right? You know, like, that's ridiculous and dumb. But I see kind of you know telesurgery

happening through there like but i mean when i think about like is it better to have a virtual meeting where everyone's kind of floating around as a holograph or something i'm like i guess but i try to get out of meetings now already and it's already set on zoom so why don't i want a holograph so i don't i just don't know what the hell we're going to do with it yet and i don't want to dismiss it but it's just not clear to me what we're actually going to do with it so far. Yeah. Zoom has made it worse. Like everybody wants to look at me when they talk to me now. Oh yeah. I'm sorry. Like what happened to just send, sending me a text. Now everybody wants to do a zoom call. So yeah, maybe not everything is better. And I actually agree with you. My, you know, there's sort of this ready player,

one vision of the, of the metaverse, right. Where we just plug in and go live a completely separate life. And we're basically like in a chair with our goggles on right i don't see that i think it will have siloed i like real life experiences yeah we'll have siloed experiences like the different games and the different ones where you'll go in for an hour and you'll play like gaming and then i think the metaverse is exactly what you described which is why i think it already exists as you said i think it's an augmented reality where it enhances the things that we're already doing on a day to day basis. So maybe you're in your car that's driving itself and you're wearing some sort of wearable and every sign that you look at, you can click and buy the item or get more information or sort of the exactly. I mean, I've described exactly how you did. that's what i think the metaverse really will be yes it's an overlay it's a meta overlay on reality right and it enhances that i

mean i think look there's there's virtual experiences that are amazing right and i think that there's everybody loves to go into like an awesome gaming world with like you know i mean elden ring i i don't have a next gen console now because i'm traveling but you know i watched a bunch on twitch and i was mesmerized by just how cool it looked and you know the the tremendous creativity you know around that and sure i'd love to put on a strap on a helmet or run around and kill dragons and stuff for a period of time um but i irl you know in real life is really like sometimes downplayed and i don't know if we want the kind of really dystopian view of ready player one right where you're every like everyone's poor and there's no middle class

and we're all just literally opting out you're opting out of your real life because it's horrible that's not that doesn't that's not better in your life that's running from it right yeah everyone's an incel you know like that's just a terrible, that's terrible. Right. But augmented reality is awesome. I love that concept. I love the idea that it can be an overlay with additional information right at my fingertips. That's right on my eyeballs. If I want it, I just think that's, that's freaking fantastic. And that's where I really wanted to see it go. And I could see much more potential for that.

But I mean, it sounds like one way or another, whether it's what we're familiar with or not, blockchain technology will underlie quite a bit of what you envision for the future. Yeah, when I look at blockchain technology, like I tend to abstract it out, it's kind of like moving up the stack, right? If you look at, it's a distributed database, and it's in a decentralization technology, and it's a decentralized consensus technology, right? So if I think about kind of monetary policy, it could be distributed over a larger group of people, including groups that are potentially hostile to each other, right, where they couldn't make decisions. We can make decisions in a small tribal group or in a

corporation, but when you get much larger, you know, the democracy, it gets messier, that's fine. But then beyond that, kind of groups, you know, that don't agree at all, there's no way for them to come to a consensus. But with blockchain, you can, because you can make it a protocol, and you don't have to agree with the people on the other truth or whatever, but like a state in time that we are all agreed to of where is all the money or where are the messages at this point? Where do all the JPEGs live, right? And to me, in many ways, so that's a state machine and it's a trust machine and it's a truth machine, right? It's saying like, this is where all the money exists at this snapshot in time. This is where all the message exists at this snapshot in time. This is where all the message exists at this snapshot in time. And so I think we could do a lot of cool things with that. If you look at the web, like in the early days,

we were trying to figure out how to build a gigantic database and a log on system for everybody. And now everybody kind of figured out the technology, but you have a stupid password you forget for every single thing. But it's a commodity technology. It wouldn't be awesome

if there was sort of a unified layer, right? For like identity, where you basically just have your identity wallet. And you're like, okay, cool. I've granted the rights to like this site and I'm allowed to then, you know, log onto it and do what I want. And then I've deleted the rights to that site and they no longer have to spend time building a login system and maintaining and securing it, right? They can move up the stack, develop cooler tools on top of those types of things. So when I look at kind of like a distributed consensus mechanism,

that's for voting, that's for deciding policies, right? Whether that's in dollar or money or voting or it could be everything from a tribal knitting circle to like a nation state to international types of things. That could be a distributed database for storing information, right? And it could be a distributed database for storing information, right? And it could be a distributed identity chain, right? And a distributed property chain. And those things, once they're kind of just solved at that layer, there's just sort of a universal

plugin to it. We kind of move up the stack and solve more interesting problems. And that's always what you do. If you look at something like early days of the internet, we're all trying to figure out how to code HTML in college and it looks crappy and we're all using the the stupid guy like shoveling you know in in development and now and then all of a sudden you get to the point where apache comes out in php and all of a sudden my sequel okay and now once you have those technology layer you've moved up now okay wordpress comes out now wordpress runs you know 700 million sites or whatever and you know crappy designers like me don't need to know a bunch of things. I can do a little Photoshop.

I can do a little coding. I can do a little design work. I can grab a template. I can put together a page that looks incredible. And hundreds of millions of other people can do it too. They move up the stack to solve additional problems. Those plugins come in. And that's always the way that technology develops.

It's about moving up the stack. You solve a problem that was unsolvable at one level. And then when somebody comes up with the solution, finally, everyone goes, oh, of course. But then the hardest part is that initial breakthrough, making the first light bulb. Right? But once it happens, you get a bunch of smart minds that can iterate on it, make it better, smarter, longer lasting, et cetera, boom. And all of a sudden, the smarter minds are able to blow up the stack and solve more interesting problems. Yeah, I have about 100 more questions, but no more time, unfortunately. But you are invited back anytime. It's one of my favorite

conversations by far that I've had on the podcast. I hope everybody listens to it. So where can everybody follow you and keep up with you after this? So there's Twitter, there's Dan underscore Jeffries1. Make sure you put the one on it. Or there's Dan Jeffries who studies the asexual reproduction of tree frogs, but Dan underscore Jeffries. A hard act to compete with. Yeah, there's Medium at the end, Jeffries. And then there's my artificial intelligence foundation, which is the AI-infrastructure.org.

So those are the major places that people can find me. And I appreciate you having me on the show. It was a lot of fun. It was a great conversation. I appreciate you taking it in a hundred different directions. I, well, I do have ADHD, so I never know where my mind's going to go. But as I like to say to my guests at the beginning, I don't really know what we're going to talk about. It's sort of based on where the conversation goes, and I love the direction this went. And as you know, these can go for hours,

right? If you just start thinking of the possibilities of the future and the potential, it's really endless. So we will do this again. Thank you once again for joining. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me.